Here‘s Bloomberg’s report on today’s data release.  One paragraph has caused the Drudge Report to run the headline “GOV’T MAKES IT UP: JOB NUMBERS ‘ESTIMATED’ FOR WEEK…” (Caps by Drudge).  Here’s the paragraph:

For the latest reporting week, nine states didn’t file claims data to the Labor Department in Washington because of the federal holiday earlier this week, a Labor Department official told reporters. As a result, California and Virginia estimated their figures and the U.S. government estimated the other seven, the official said.

Drudge’s link leads to here.  I don’t know who Tyler Durden is, but this is priceless:

Official data is now made up on the fly. This US economic data reporting has just entered the twilight zone. Also, when the data is officially made up, it is not that difficult to get data that is “better than expected.”

Wow.  These guys need to relax.

Here’s a little secret for Drudge and Durden: All data are estimates, and there are error bounds around the estimates.  The best kept data in the United States is on deaths, and even there, every now and then and here and there, bodies or body parts pop up, showing previous death estimates to be wrong.

What the statement about estimates really means is that this time they used an estimating method that has larger error bounds than the methods they usually use.  These are professionals, and I’m sure they used an unbiased estimator.  It just has larger error bounds, and that doesn’t even mean that the inevitable revision will necessarily be larger than normal.